Clint Eastwood is one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the world, but it wasn't always thus — especially in America. Having gotten his start on the long-running TV Western "Rawhide," Eastwood subverted his cowboy image via his appearances in Sergio Leone's "Man with No Name Trilogy" (i.e. "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad and The Ugly"). In the 1970s and into the '80s he was best known as "Dirty Harry" Callahan, a renegade, due-process-loathing cop hellbent on cleaning up the scumbag-infested streets of San Francisco. Clint Eastwood was larger than life, and the films that made and sustained his stardom (which included the redneck orangutan duology of "Every Which Way But Loose" and "Any Which Way You Can"), weren't always high-minded entertainment.
Those who'd been paying attention to Eastwood's career outside of his hits, however, knew he had a predilection for undercutting his tough guy persona in movies like "The Beguiled," "Play Misty for Me," and "Honkytonk Man." As he neared sixty, the filmmaker began to take risks as a director. A huge jazz devotee, he tried, and failed, to make sense of the tortured life of pioneering saxophonist Charlie Parker with "Bird." He then attempted "White Hunter, Black Heart," an adaptation of Peter Viertel's barely fictionalized account of the time he spent with John Huston during the shoot of "The African Queen." It was a fascinating topic, but Eastwood couldn't find his way into the material.
Then he found "Unforgiven."